Our findings were informed by original interviews with big thinkers at leading companies and universities, authors and reporters, and designers from around the world who are already sketching the future.

Legal Innovation

Daniel Katz, associate professor & co-director of ReInvent Law at Michigan State University College of Law: "Let's say you're a partner and you make $600,000 a year, and a bad year is $500,000 and a good year is $750,000. You're in the top one-half of one percent of wage-earners. It doesn't sound like you have a problem. Every signal from the outside says you're okay." Read more...

William Sullivan, lead author of The Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Future of Law: "The reason the way the discussion of justice appears in Educating Lawyers was the discovery early on — for me it was something of a shock — that just in the way that some physicians become detached from questions of whether you can keep the population healthy, many lawyers are becoming detached from those questions as well." Read more...

Andy Daws, vice president of Riverview Law: "If it’s impossible for them to reinvent efficiently from within, then the wise ones will create an autonomous unit, throwing in a mixture of some of the best people from their current organization as well as some very smart business-minded people. It would be a sort of lifeboat from the mothership. These firms are like the proverbial oil tanker unable to turn in time. There is too much momentum, too much entrenchment. So you would need people who have the freedom to respond to changing conditions." Read more...

Culture

Bill Bishop, co-author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart: "Every other collective enterprise is losing favor. But that’s also the danger for the institution of the law. The danger is that it will be perceived in the same way that Congress is perceived, and people will lose their faith in it. If that happens, it would be impossible for us to have that kind of collective governance." Read more...

Marc Hetherington, professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism: "If you think of the public as the party that was cheated on in the marriage, they may be upset when the spouse gets home late, whereas before it might have taken lipstick on the collar to raise their concerns. Trust in government was relatively blind in the 50s and 60s; if it recovers as I predict, it would not be blind in the same way." Read more...

Naomi Schaefer Riley, former editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America: "So what we've got is this group of people who are spending long periods of their 20s or their 30s away from institutional religion. They are moving from place to place. This is what’s called 'emerging adulthood' or 'the odyssey years.' These people are less likely to go to services regularly or think about religion or be tied to a specific religious community. But this is also the point when they’re likely to meet their future spouse." Read more...

Design

Margaret Hagan, founder of Open Law Lab: "I’m not talking about just helping people order a document or fill out a form. I’m talking about tools that help people get through an entire legal process in a way that gives them greater agency." Read more...

Jason Kunesh, CEO of Public Good Software and former director of user experience at Obama for America: "I think all sorts of things are ripe to be hacked. We've done a lot of work in business to add value through technology. But there are a lot of other things in society that need that too. I think government is ripe to be hacked. But we’ll need to re-imagine the relationship between people and government to do it, then use technology to remove everything getting in the way of making those relationships open and authentic." Read more...

Davide “Folletto” Casali, user experience designer with Automattic, the makers of WordPress: "It seems to me that the lesson people who are interested in innovation should take away from all this is that for almost any kind of technology you might want, there is probably somebody out there already who is tinkering with it just for fun. But it’s going to look like a waste of time. It’s going to look like an outlier." Read more...

Carolyn Chandler, design instructor and co-author of Adventures in Experience Design: "Categories are always outputs of some kind of framework, and the framework is what you are trying to analyze. Designers are kind of obsessed with trying to build the best framework, to make sure that it won’t break because they didn’t take everything into account." Read more...

George Aye, co-founder of Greater Good Studio and assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: "I think that for a long time, we had a lot of inertia as a discipline around making stuff. That was our first response to a problem — design new things — and it was actually kind of irresponsible. There was a lack of constraints around the questions of, 'Why do this project right now?' The result was the pages and pages of things you see in SkyMall. The basic solution was to make something in the hope that someone would buy it." Read more...

Lee-Sean Huang, founder and creative director of Foossa: "Another thing that designers habitually do is analyze the context of something while simultaneously projecting alternative outcomes. In most areas of life, there are researchers who are trying to describe what’s going on and other folks who are more prescriptive. But designers sort of bridge that gap by asking about how you would get there or what might be the steps in between." Read more...

Bill DeRouchey, design studio lead at GE: "You’re always trying to solve a client’s pain in some way. They came to you because they have a problem. We tend to assume that there is something underneath that problem that they can’t see on their own. So if you have to cause some temporary pain to help them see the real cause of their pain, that’s a good thing." Read more...

Jason Ulaszek, co-founder of UX for Good and head of user experience design at Manifest Digital: "They’d want everything to be the best it could be. You’d have stronger solutions and stronger ideas because of that. You wouldn't just be optimizing for the system that is. You’d be trying to invoke new ways of doing things, trying to guide everyone toward a new perspective." Read more...

Frank Maugeri, co-creative director of Redmoon Theater in Chicago: "It’s hard to say where it starts or stops. But I do think the design process can start with some broad question about human experience. When I create a show, one of the main questions in my mind is what elements I’ll need for people to feel the narrative instead of just see and hear the narrative." Read more...

Tanarra Schneider, director of insights & planning at Critical Mass: "Whether you’re a designer or a teacher or an attorney or a doctor, I would hope that if you are going to build something from the ground up, that you care enough to understand how it impacts the people you say you’re trying to serve. You have to challenge yourself to not be afraid, to get your hands dirty, to understand the guts of what you’re building. Otherwise, when real people are using it, and it breaks, you can’t fix it." Read more...

Hilary Hoeber, a San Francisco-based designer who led the public sector portfolio at IDEO from 2004 to 2013: "People overemphasize the role of the great idea. Whether it’s an individual or a team, they think that a single great idea is what leads to great design. But there are so many other things that need to be in place for design to happen. The team has to trust each other. They have to respect each other’s disciplines." Read more...

Economics

Charles Wheelan, University of Chicago economist and author of Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science: "One thing that technology can do is make things bigger and better and faster. But another thing it can do is make things cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. It can give us DVD players that cost $8. In a field like health care, though, there is virtually no demand for technologies that decrease cost. When someone else is paying the bill, we naturally demand things with more bells and whistles." Read more...

Leo Burke, professor at Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame: "We need to re-think what our operating assumptions are when we look at businesses. A business today may conceive of itself as operating in one nation-state and then opening an office in some other nation-state somewhere across the sea. But soon that will seem like an idea from the Middle Ages. So it’s not just doing business internationally or opening new offices 'overseas.' It’s re-defining what the nature of business is." Read more...

Penny Abeywardena, associate director of commitments and head of the Girls and Women program at the Clinton Global Initiative: "There’s another interesting implication in all of this, which will be the changing role of men. How will we educate our boys and men to participate with women as equals in this kind of economy? The World Bank recently released a study that suggests that if men aren't brought along in this project of educating and empowering women, violence against women will rise." Read more...

Geoffrey Hewings, professor at the University of Illinois and director of the Regional Economics Applications Lab: "So if you fast-forward ten or fifteen years, we’ll probably have people who work in manufacturing going to work in suits. Well, metaphorically anyway — hardly anyone goes to work in a suit anymore. But the distinction between the manufacturing and service sectors will blur. The skills you would need to work in the manufacturing industry will be closer to those you would need to work in the medical profession or the legal profession." Read more...

Technology

Stefan Weitz, director of search at Microsoft Bing; Aaron Frank, business development manager at Singularity University; and Harper Reed, formerly CTO of Obama for America: "Their whole world could be shaken by crowd-sourcing. Imagine if someone uploads a non-disclosure agreement and could quickly get a Wikipedia-level understanding of what that agreement actually says. They wouldn't need to go to a lawyer for that ‘first pass.’" Read more...